Paper 35: "Mass Extinctions in the Marine Fossil Record" - Raup & Sepkoski (1982)

An afterthought for the TIFFNOLLAS paper

An afterthought and a well-clad cladogram, that is

Here's a family tree for plants I made earlier today:

I hope you will all give it a quick critique to fix any mistakes I made while composing it. Expand for better view plox.

Here's another version with blobs drawn around the evolutionary groups discussed in the paper

I think there's three important differences between the marine fossil record and the record for land plants.
1) The fossil record for marine invertebrates >>> the fossil record for terrestrial plants, so you have to take it for what it is.
2) That being said, unlike the marine fossil record where multiple, often distantly related, high-order varieties of animals form a motley group of dominant organisms, the dominant groups formed by plants are (mostly) monophyletic, or at least closely related. If I say, 'trilobites, crinoids, and brachiopods were dominant, but then they were replaced with bivalves, asteroids, and crustaceans' I'm describing disparately related sets of things. If, on the other hand, I say, "gymnosperms were dominant, but then they were replaced with angiosperms,' I'm describing monophyletic or very closely related sets of things.
3) Unlike on Jack's Curve, where the older fauna more or less get utterly replaced by the new fauna and only persist into the present as a little sliver at the bottom of the graph, the 'old guard' flora stick around. Fig. 1 somewhat illustrates this, although Fig. 1 annoys me. Perhaps the recent fossil record is incongruent with modern plants, because figure one shows modern gymnosperms (c) being more populous than modern pteridophytes (b)! Whut!? My favorite authority relates that there are ~900 species of gymnosperms alive today and ~11,000 species of pteridophytes. Wikipedia says 1,080 gymnosperms and 10,560 pteridophytes, the general effect is the same. There are about ten times as many pteridophytes alive today as there are gymnosperms. b > c, not the other way around. This all relates back to point #1, the fossil record for plants sucks and we have to take it with a grain of salty salt. Moreover, what I'm trying to say is, the dominant floras have never really gone away, as happened in the marine realm. Instead the previously dominant varieties of plants simply become less dominant, but never really get replaced. Of course, that relates (I suspect?) to ecospace building?

Anyway, overall, thought it was a good paper. Choo choo, all aboard the paleobotany train. Toot!